the silent film thread

RIP Stuart Oderman, longtime accompanist at NYC MoMA and elsewhere

http://www.silentfilmmusicblog.com/2017/08/stuart-oderman-1940-2017-silent-film.html

The Vortex (Brunel, 1928): A coherent and competently made drama (I'm not familiar with the original play; I gather that it was somewhat watered down in the adaptation).

Canned Harmony (Guy, 1911): A rewatch to try to figure out if the phone call sequence is true split-screen (I don't think so, but it would help if I knew more than the basics of film composition and theory).

Algie the Miner (Guy, 1912): Question to anyone who is familiar with The Celluloid Closet: does it attempt to assess how contemporary audiences perceived material that viewers who have been conditioned to look for subtext now read as gay? This dirty-minded fangirl smirked her way through the bits with Algie's tiny gun, and when Algie kissed the men he met upon arriving in the west, but...do we know anything about how the original audiences received these images?

i've been thinking of watching every available movie from exactly 100 years ago. is this a crazy idea?

well, imdb lists 5,498 titles from 1917. assume that 90% of them are lost (the standard estimate), and you've only got about 550 to watch. actually tracking down copies of all those films, however, is, yes, probably very crazy.

is this a project you would continue indefinitely? seems like it would become impossible after a certain point, maybe around like the mid-30s. might be cool for 1920 and before.

RIP Stuart Oderman, longtime accompanist at NYC MoMA and elsewhere

http://www.silentfilmmusicblog.com/2017/08/stuart-oderman-1940-2017-silent-film.html🕸

I'd probably continue it until I finished one full year. I haven't done any planning for it yet, just one of those big hobby project ideas I throw around in my head. like watching every Best Picture winner or everything Hitchcock did.

i've seen Algie, j.lu, but i don't know the answer to your second question and i don't have my copy of the Russo book handy. But in every era surely there'd be different responses by different sectors of the audience.

abanana, on a more manageable level, the film-log site Letterboxd lists 392 films for 1917, around 300 of which have been logged as 'seen' by at least one person. I doubt you could get your eyes on more than 150-200 if you tried exhaustively.

mostly silent, anyway:

You can watch the entire out-of-print TREASURES FROM AMERICAN FILM ARCHIVES set legally & for free here:https://t.co/pVytte9vZu

— Movies Silently (@MoviesSilently) October 2, 2017

Saw Pandora's Box restoration w/ a new orchestral score at NYFF last night. Janus/Criterion was thanked, so BR from them shortly?

That Pabst was somethin' else.

Kristin Thompson's best of 1927

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2017/12/27/the-ten-best-films-of-1927/

att Londoners, 10-11 March

https://us16.campaign-archive.com/?u=09e702562c5a537dc524bded5&id=e5b23c015b

http://www.kenningtonbioscope.com/

A hell of a program! If you have any interest in silent comedy, do not miss "Seven Years Bad Luck" or "Battle of the Century." There's nothing quite like a good comedy as seen with an appreciative audience.

some nice 110-year-old animation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu-1t9sId5I

oh wow, thanks for the heads-up! And Kevin Brownlow will be there.

Steven Spielberg came into my curator/librarian friend's workplace the other day to watch something, and they had a chat about silent comedy. :o

Only got to catch one session of that festival mentioned above. As a silent cinema neophyte I was particularly impressed by the previously unknown to me Lupino Lane!

The Holy Mountain (Arnold Fanck) - I loved this. The Skiing, dancing, views of the moutains, the dream images and even Leni Riefenstahl. She's an unusual leading actress, her posture is often bent over and I've never seen anyone quite like her.
Eureka disc came with documentary The Wonderful Horrible life Of Leni Riefenstahl (3 hours long) which is great too. Kind of incredible to see her filming underwater at 90 and stroking the backs of stingrays. Really want to see Blue Light, Tiefland and maybe Olympia. What could have been if she hadn't got involved with Nazis.

anyone been to the SF Silent Fest?

https://prod3.agileticketing.net/websales/pages/list.aspx?epguid=7ecd8d33-d7d0-46b0-a62a-af16bcbe6fc6&

Going to see Pandora's Box tomorrow, which I've never seen. Any good?

amazing acting by louise brooks, imo the best screen performance of the era

yes

btw:

https://www.kinolorber.com/film/pioneers-first-women-filmmakers

Morbs is my favourite critic tbh

Brooks looks all kinds of chic in the pics I've seen.

thank you Ross, but i really am not one

That was really good! And surprisingly busy. The ‘dad’ villain was really good, though the heavy villain reminded me of bill ponderosa from always sunny...

The whole film relies on Louise Brooks though - if she wasn't as charismtic/photogenic etc. I'm not sure it would have worked. A lot of gay women at the showing too - I guess the countess is a notable gay figure?

The interview with Brooks in The Parades Gobe By is very good.

The movie that made Mary Pickford a star, The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) is one of the more visually inventive silents I've seen. The character design in the fantasy sequences is quite remarkable, and the entire film (despite some expected sap) is very playful and fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd6yRluZW7I

my friend wrote Slapstick Divas

https://silentlondon.co.uk/2018/10/15/sisters-in-slapstick-two-books-on-silent-comediennes/

Your friend will be presenting an Alice Howell program as part of AFI's 2018 Silent Cinema Showcase. I ordered my series pass last night; is anyone else going?

Right after Thanksgiving, NY MoMA will be doing ten days of Silent Comedy International:

https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5021

Yay Max Linder!

Outstanding article on a director I've never heard of until now:

The Lost Apocalypse of Romaine Fielding - https://www.acidwest.com/lostapocalypse

Big international comedy retro at NYC MoMA beginning Friday

https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5021?locale=en

http://www.silentfilmmusic.com/category/silent-comedy-international/

Looking forward to my first Charles Puffy film.

Will you be seeing Le petit café? I was urging the AFI Silver programmer to keep these films in mind when planning the 2019 Silent Cinema Showcase, but he sidetracked into that recently rediscovered Oswald the Rabbit cartoon.

I haven't had time to look up individual titles... I'd likely be seeing the whole series if it wasn't for, y'know, effing Thanksgiving.

Me, watching: oh hell fuckin yea here we go. pic.twitter.com/XoM1cwH1dk

— 𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝕰𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞 𝕯𝖆𝖞 (@NickPinkerton) November 29, 2018

Finally got the Griffith Biograph shorts disc (Kino) out of the library... may not have seen any of em before. Musketeers of Pig Alley still works as a crime film, and Those Awful Hats still delivers as a fantasy about bad filmgoers.

seeing tomorrow

On Benjamin Chapin/ John M. Stahl's The Lincoln Cycle (1918), playing @FilmLinc as part of @FilmComment Selects, for @reverse_shot: https://t.co/I1M3wVJX50

— 𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝕰𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞 𝕯𝖆𝖞 (@NickPinkerton) February 8, 2019

Enoch Arden (1911) is one of the more formally intriguing Griffith shorts... first two-reeler? (It was shown in two parts due to exhibitors refusal to run it all for one admission.)

More closeups, particularly when the departing seafarer's lips can be read telling his wife "I'll come back."

https://backtothepastweb.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/enoch-arden-1911/

Coeur fidèle (Epstein, 1923) is playing this weekend at the National Gallery of Art, with accompaniment by Alloy Orchestra. Is anyone else going?

no, but same show tnite at Lincoln Center

good performance -- not sure it's a *great* film but an absorbing and stylish one

A standard melodrama, told through breakneck cutting and editing. And I still haven't heard an Alloy Orchestra accompaniment I didn't like.

You know you're watching Laurel & Hardy's Bacon Grabbers with a specialized audience when Edgar Kennedy gets a hand on his entrance. (In other shorts, so did James Finlayson and Jean Harlow.)

nerds

watched Griffith's True Heart Susie yesterday -- only Lillian Gish can convincingly pour her secrets out to her cow.

I'm midway through watching Intolerance right now and wow is it confusing, even more than was expected, was DW Griffith on a coke bender or something?

This is wonderful news for the silent film community. @tcm affirms its commitment to our arcane art form by appointing a leading scholar in the field, Jacqueline Stewart (@ProfJStewart), as the host of its weekly Silent Sunday Night program.https://t.co/h5lcSYgAJX

— Dave Kehr (@dave_kehr) September 10, 2019